Cotton gin when was invented

Link : See The Approved Patent. Much of that cotton made its way to Northern manufacturers to be made into clothing and other products. But slavery, in addition to the cotton gin, was a key component of the cotton business.

Whitney got the idea for the gin while working as a tutor near the estate of Catherine Greene in Savannah. Greene, the widow of General Nathanael Greene also may have suggested some of the concepts behind the gin to Whitney, according to one nineteenth-century author. The gin separated the sticky seeds from the fibers in short-staple cotton, which was easy to grow in the deep South but difficult to process.

The gin improved the separation of the seeds and fibers but the cotton still needed to be picked by hand. So cotton became a very profitable crop that also demanded a growing slave-labor force to harvest it. The American inventor Eli Whitney is responsible for inventing the machine that would successfully process short-staple material in His process, however, damaged extra-long-staple varieties.

He was granted a patent for his invention, called the saw gin , the following year. Cotton could be easily grown, and its fibers could be stored for a long time, unlike food crops.

So, in many ways, it was an ideal crop. The challenge came in separating the seeds from the soft fibers. This is not an easy process. The seeds and fibers must first be separated to make the fibers usable. Additionally, the short-staple version was more labor-intensive, as it had to be painstakingly hand-cleaned, one plant at a time.

The average rate for removing seeds by hand was only about one pound per day. The long-staple variety was easy to clean but only grew well along coastal areas, so that crop was necessarily limited in scope. Those fibers can then be processed into various goods, while any undamaged material is used mostly for textiles like clothing.

The material was run through a wooden drum, which was embedded with a series of hooks. These hooks caught the fibers and dragged them through a mesh. The mesh was too fine to let the seeds through, but the hooks pulled the fibers through easily. Smaller gins were cranked by hand. Larger ones were powered by a horse and, later, by a steam engine. Growing a crop was very labor-intensive by itself. Separating the fiber from the cottonseed was even more difficult and time-consuming prior to the invention of the machine.

Further improvements and modifications were made to the mechanism over the years. Fones McCarthy was granted a patent in for a roller version that was particularly effective at processing long-staple varieties.

His mechanism was called a Smooth Cylinder Cotton-gin. Additional improvements and features included:. Finally, with what has become known as The Munger System Ginning Outfit , or system gin, all the ginning operation machinery was able to be fully integrated. This system ensured that the material would flow through the machines easily while using air to move material from mechanism to mechanism.

This resulted in decreased production costs, increased efficiency, and higher quality fiber. By the s, many other advances had been made in ginning machinery, but the way in which cottonseed flowed through the machinery continued to be based on the Munger system.

The two entrepreneurs planned to build cotton gins and install them on plantations throughout the South, taking as payment a portion of all the cotton produced by each plantation. While farmers were delighted with the idea of a machine that could boost cotton production so dramatically, they had no intention of sharing a significant percentage of their profits with Whitney and Miller.

The patent laws of the time had loopholes that made it difficult for Whitney to protect his rights asan inventor. Still, the cotton gin had transformed the American economy. Although the cotton gin made cotton processing less labor-intensive, it helped planters earn greater profits, prompting them to grow larger crops, which in turn required more people. Because slavery was the cheapest form of labor, cotton farmers simply acquired more slaves.

Patent-law issues prevented Whitney from ever significantly profiting from the cotton gin; however, in , he secured a contract from the U. Whitney promoted the idea of interchangeable parts : standardized, identical parts that would make for faster assembly as well as easier repair of various objects and machines. At the time, guns were typically built individually by skilled craftsmen, so that each finished device was unique.

Although it ultimately took Whitney some 10 years, instead of two, to fulfill his contract, he was credited with playing a pioneering role in the development of the American system of mass-production. In , Whitney, then in his early 50s, married Henrietta Edwards, with whom he would have four children. He died on January 8, , at age But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.

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